'Anti-racist' Duquesne U. professor supports the 'end of whiteness'

Derek Hook, a professor at Duquense University in Pennsylvania, recently uploaded a now very controversial video arguing for the extinction of "whiteness" as a concept.

The video, which has since gone viral, and then made private by Hook, was originally uploaded in Jun. 2021 as part of a presentation for the American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work.

Hook was quoting a South African professor of philosophy, Terblanche Delport, who had written an article entitled, "White people should commit suicide as an ethical act."

In the article, Delport expounds that "The reality [within South Africa today] is that most white people spend their whole lives only engaging black people in subservient positions."

"… My question is then how can a person not be racist if that’s the way they live their lives? The only way then for white people to become part of Africa is to not exist as white people anymore,"

"If the goal is to dismantle white supremacy, and white supremacy is white culture … then the goal has to be to dismantle white culture and ultimately white people themselves."

"The total integration into Africa by white people will also automatically then mean the death of white people as white as a concept would not exist anymore."

Hook then opined that, while Delport is a "fighter academic" and may have been too rhetorical in some of his comments, "nevertheless, I want to make the argument that there is some kind of ethical dimension to his, his provocations."

"I think that Delport took his White audience to the threshold of a type of symbolic extinction … he took them to a proposed end of whiteness," continued Hook.

A spokesperson for Duquesne University (officially a Catholic university), defended Hook, stating:

"Professor Hook also said that the provocateur who used this example was wrong in suggesting any such radical action. The words being circulated were simply lifted out of context to distort the actual comments. Saying that Professor Hook called for anything like the words in question is false."

"While some of the content in the recording certainly contained troubling elements if taken alone, the full discussion only references the work of another person (Terblanche Delport, as the slides indicate) and the extreme proposition in the context of post-Apartheid South Africa."

"Duquesne University is a Catholic institution that condemns any suggestion that suicide is to be advocated or endorsed in any form."

While it is clear that Hook is not advocating physical suicide, it also seems plain that he does want to end "whiteness" culturally, a sentiment shared by some of his colleagues in academia and in the media.